Page:Frank Packard - Greater Love Hath No Man.djvu/159



LREADY late afternoon, Varge came through the penitentiary gates, and with quick, eager steps traversed the few hundred yards of roadway to the warden's house. Four days had passed since he had been there; four days that had seemed interminably long and restless days; four days, too, that had been miserable, unpleasant ones for him.

Old and familiar faces had crowded the little court-room in Berley Falls again, and he had shared the sordid honour with Twisty Connors and the Butcher of being the centre of attraction, the sensation of the moment. The eyes that had gazed on him there had lost no whit of the interest with which they had gazed when, once before, he had stood in that same room, then on trial for his own life—they had lost only their friendliness. And in the faces of those who crowded the benches to capacity was—strange phase of human nature!—that smug, morbid content that springs from the sometime personal intimacy with one who, having gained celebrity, whether from unenviable notoriety or exalted fame, will presently afford them the exquisite conceit of airing that intimacy to less favoured mortals from the vantage ground of lofty condescension!

It had not escaped Varge in any measure—the nodding, wagging heads, the gaping mouths, the whispered conversations into one another's ears. It was